I'm looking to buy a USB memory which I can carry an operating system (some flavour of Linux) on and use for booting. It would be fun to use it to play mp3 files as well when I'm not at a computer. Any suggestions? or will any mp3 player do? Which players have others been successful with?

I was thinking of putting in a live distro but it would be nice to be able to have apartition for carrying data as well. So I'd need three partitions:
1 for the linux boot
1 for the data
1 for the mp3 part of the player.
Anybody done this?

Nicekiwi9

im not too sure about a Mp3 player, but ive tryed to install windows and some versions of linux on a USB hdd, and a flashdrive, nither succeded. i think USB is too slow for it or somthing...., as long as the media files were on the main root of the player it should play them as well as store linux etc.....,

i tryed for ages to make it boot, give it a try.....

clip

in terms of speed, firewire is better than USB. but yeah, it's possible to make a boot a pc using a flash disk. as long as it's generic. some fo my friends use their flash drives as a part of their system's master boot prerequisites. so if they don't want others to use their pc's, they just unplug their USB disks and voila!

TimsJugling

My brother did. He used a Sony and he said that nothing went wrong.
If it works for you let me know what kind of MP3 Player your using.

matt87

I am unsure that you can boot off of your mp3 but I have external harddrive with another operating system on it and I somtimes boot it.

Dustin

I dont think thats possible, i know you can use an external CD drive as a boot drive but i dont think external USB's are capable of doing that. Ohh well ya never know people do somepretty amazing things witht he computer

Rsamaster

lol i'd love to but dunno how.

You can definately boot linux off usb drives, but i'm not sure about mp3 players. You can take a look at this linux which is jsut 50mb!

haha. yeah i've been having a lot of problems with my computer. i tried repartioning w/ partion magic so i could gentoo but now windows doesn't boot. so i'm using Knoppix, running off a CD. its pretty good, but I can't save anything and it runs through RAM and 128mb isn't enough yeah i got to the point where i was going to try to save through the xD card in my digicam. as far as booting, IDK, google is your friend. let us know if you can get it to work

webapp

it is possible to boo using a mp3 player as boot disk.....
after all it is jst another storage device......

yu might need drivers for that....

d722002

I dont think its possible, but I have heard of using USB Flash Drives as boot disks.

a_dubDesign

clip wrote:

in terms of speed, firewire is better than USB. but yeah, it's possible to make a boot a pc using a flash disk. as long as it's generic. some fo my friends use their flash drives as a part of their system's master boot prerequisites. so if they don't want others to use their pc's, they just unplug their USB disks and voila!

you happen to know off the top fo your head how they did that, or a link to a page that says how. I'd love to do that.

bigdan

d722002 wrote:

I dont think its possible, but I have heard of using USB Flash Drives as boot disks.

I think it is possible, one of the major computer magazines in Australia ran an issue with free software to turn a thumb drive/MP3 player into a boot disk or mini Linux distro.

I've got an old MP3 player (256Meg, got a new 1GB player) that I might have a go at turning into a boot disk. I'm hoping 256meg is enough.

handeyman

It is possible, I installed Ubuntu Linux on my iAudio X5 and set my machine to boot from USB, it loads up fairly good, not as fast as it could be though.

bigdan

handeyman wrote:

It is possible, I installed Ubuntu Linux on my iAudio X5 and set my machine to boot from USB, it loads up fairly good, not as fast as it could be though.

Oh good. I'll have to have a go sometime

steveadams617

DSL will boot from a usb device. Your computer's bios has to support booting from USB, however, and you have to turn this option on in your bios setup. Alternately, you can boot from a floppy which then loads the operating system from the USB device.

If you get serious about trying this, post again and I will post more detailed instructions. I actually got it to work, but it took some doing to put my USB drive back the way it was when I was finished experimenting.

Thanks

Davidgr1200

It seems that people are prety divided - about half think you can and half think you can't. The reason I was asking for people who have done it is so that I can buy a suitable player (preferably a cheap one) that I can experiment with - I don't want to ruin my (expensive) current player. I'll be following up some of the links mentioned, and I will report back, though it may take a while.

Bookface

I haven't done it myself, but I've booted from other USB devices, which is almost exactly the same thing.

In any case, your BIOS needs to support it, and you do NOT need drivers.

I have had no success booting off a USB drive when the BIOS didn't support it, i.e. via a floppy drive first. I wouldn't recommend trying, I think it's a waste of time.

And it doesn't much matter what type of USB MP3 player, thumbdrive, or harddrive you get.

sibbahz

Never knew you could boot from usb, does anyone know if you can use an ipod mini to do this?

canakalin

whoa a o.s in a mp3 player hmm it must be interesting but i'm using my mobile phone as mp3 player well maybe i'll buy an mp3 player for it then